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Technology is business, and dealing with
the media, the public, financiers, and government agencies
can be as important to an invention's success as effective
product development. To understand how rhetoric works in
technology, one cannot do better than to start with the
American inventor Thomas Alva Edison and the incandescent
light bulb.
Charles Bazerman tells the story of the
emergence of electric light as a story of symbols and communication.
He examines how Edison and his colleagues represented light
and power to themselves and to others as the technology
was transformed from an idea to a daily fact of life. He
looks at the rhetoric used to create meaning and value for
the emergent technology in the laboratory, in patent offices
and courts, in financial markets, in boardrooms, in city
halls, in newspapers, and in the consumer marketplace. Along
the way he describes the social and communicative arrangements
that shaped and transformed the world in which Edison acted.
He portrays Edison, both the individual and the corporation,
as a self-conscious social actor whose rhetorical groundwork
was crucial to the technology's material realization and
success.
Charles Bazerman is Professor of English
and Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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